The School of Visual Arts welcomed new and returning students back to campus this month for the start of the 2023 – 2024 academic year. Among the many benefits of being located in the heart of New York City is SVA’s close proximity to hundreds of arts institutions, which offers students endless opportunities to experience thought-provoking and inspiring encounters with work both new and old.

In the Chelsea neighborhood alone—the heart of New York’s art world—you’ll find a rich scene of galleries within footsteps. Take a short train ride to Brooklyn for its namesake museum, the city’s second-largest, or north to the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Feeling up for a leisurely ride on the Staten Island Ferry? Dock at the harbor and head for the Staten Island Museum. There is so much art to explore across the five boroughs.

This page on the SVA site always offers the most up-to-date information regarding museum memberships, including each institution’s guest policy and ticketing information. As a benefit to students, faculty and staff, SVA maintains memberships at various museums, including the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, New Museum of Contemporary Art and Whitney Museum of American Art. Here are some current exhibitions from those institutions—and others—that you won’t want to miss.

Brooklyn Museum

It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby

Through Sunday, September 24

The Brooklyn Museum partners with Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby to critically examine Picasso’s legacy through a contemporary and feminist lens. Work by women artists like Renée Cox (MFA 1992 Photography and Related Media) and SVA faculty member Marilyn Minter are installed alongside Picasso’s and accompanied by an audio tour by Gadsby that employs their incisive humor to create a space that both acknowledges Picasso’s influential legacy and asks complex questions about misogyny, “originality” and the art-historical canon.

MoMA PS1

Rirkrit Tiravanija: A Lot of People

Thursday, October 12 – Monday, March 4, 2024

Artist Rirkrit Tiravanija will have his largest exhibition to date at MoMa PS1 this October, spanning four decades of his career. Since his breakthrough show in 1989, Tiravanija has consistently pushed the boundaries of the white wall gallery space, questioning mainstream ideas of how we are meant to experience art. This exhibition explores a vast array of subject matters—including his experiences as an immigrant in a Western-centric art world to more recent interrogations of global politics and the quotidian news cycle—by bringing together everything from early experimentations with installation and film to several interactive works and five re-stagings of participatory works.

Museum of Modern Art

New Photography 2023

Through Saturday, September 16

This month is the last chance to see the most recent installment of MoMA’s ongoing New Photography series, showcasing the work of seven artists with ties to Lagos, Nigeria. The artists in this exhibition consider what it means for photography to document a city as they explore the image as a social medium—what it does, who it’s for, and what it can reveal.

While at the museum, stroll through the sculpture garden and experience its latest installation. “YOU ARE HERE* Contemporary Art in the Garden” activates the Sculpture Garden with contemporary art, nearly all made in the last 20 years, including work by BFA Fine Arts faculty member Lynda Benglis.

The New Museum

Mire Lee: Black Sun

Kinetic sculptor Mire Lee’s latest site-specific installation merges motors, tubes and pumps with silicone, ceramics, fabrics and liquids to create sculptures that evoke bodily functions and environmental decay. Drawing upon architecture, horror and cybernetics, Lee has filled the New Museum’s fourth floor with animatronic works that operate both like living organisms and biological machines, creating an unsettling sight within a show titled after Julia Kristeva’s 1987 book Black Sun, which was itself a study of depression and melancholia.

A roundup of free and affordable exhibitions on view at New York art institutions this fall.